Review & Frequenly Asked Questions:

Sillamae is a town in the northern part of Estonia on the coast of the Gulf of Finland at the mouth of Sõtke River. Until the 1920s, Sillamae was a charming resort village popular in the 1800s among the aristocracy for its spas and beautiful nature. In the 1920s, a Swedish company decided to establish a metallurgy plant in the area to process locally discovered oil shale. During WWII, the Germans established several concentration camps in the area and sabotaged a Swedish plant. After the war, the Russians converted the old plant to process oil shale into uranium oxides. Due to radioactive waste that was dumped into the Baltic Sea, the local ecology was seriously compromised, causing the city to be closed for many years. Sillamae is still an important industrial center, mining and processing rare metals, but is also an attractive city to visit with beautiful surrounding nature and several large waterfalls.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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